October, 2009

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KnowTech 2009 – A Mixed Experience

Monday, October 19th, 2009


I was lucky enough to free up two days in order to attend the leading German knowledge management conference KnowTech in Bad Homburg two weeks ago. So, what did you miss? Let’s begin with the keynotes:

  • Achim Berg’s presentation (CEO Microsoft) introduced nothing new to the audience. I assume that each attendee has followed conversations e.g. on the differences between “digital natives”, “baby boomers” and “generation X”. The focus of his presentation was on technology as an enabler for social networking. A typical sentence was “knowledge gets lost if it’s not supported with IT”. The only thing that stroke my attention was an Economist study of 2008 which has been quoted as “companies which invest in enterprise 2.0 are three times more profitable than the average”. Unfortunately, there is no source for this study in Achim Berg’s slides.
  • Dave Snowden (CEO CognitiveEdge) has given the audience a totally other experience. His keynote on “Why Does Social Computing Work?” was excellent “food for thought”, especially for those of us who still believe in KM processes, governance and infrastructure. His speech is available via the website of the institute CognitiveEdge.
  • Eventually, Utz Claassen – one of the few ‘enfant terrible’ of the German management scene – presented a very good overview on the value delivered by knowledge management. The interesting point was that he focussed on knowledge management as a value driver and that he used strictly business administration language to argue. Claassen did also a very good job in establishing a clear interrelationship between business strategy and KM. The only weak point of his presentation was the total number of slides and the amount of text on his slides.

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Enterprise 2.0 – German Employees Say “Don’t Know” or “Nein”

Thursday, October 1st, 2009


The German CIO magazine has recently realized an “IT Excellence Benchmark” and has published the most interesting resultsin German in its October edition. More than 13,000 employees from 66 companies have been interviewed and i.e. asked whether they use the following tools for collaboration:

  • Wikis: 34% said “no, I don’t use them”, 22% said “don’t know”, 18% said “I’m opposed to the usage of this tool”, only 15% said “fully agree”
  • Blogs/RSS-feeds: 35% said “no, I don’t use them”, 28% opted for “don’t know”, 25% are opposed to the usage of this tool, and only 5% “fully agree”
  • Instant Messaging: 32% don’t use them, 25% don’t know whether their company uses IM, 23% are opponents, and just 13% “fully agree”

These findings have led the magazine to title the article with “Real communities exist only in real life”. Well. that’s certainly just half of the truth. Maybe the real reason for the low adoption of web 2.0 in companies in comparison to their large usage in a privat environment lie in the difference between the norms governing them.
I’m just reading the excellent book of Dan Ariely “Predictably Irrational” and in his chapter 4 he exactly outlines “why we are happy to do things, but not when we are paid to do them”. A study that should be realized is whether the employees of companies which think more in terms of social norms also more easily adopt the social network tools.

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